The Hebrew language

Hebrew is a very old language currently spoken by close to 10 million people, out of which some 5 million live in Israel. It is a Semitic language, coming from the same language group as Arabic does, although it is not mutually intelligible with Arabic (however, it does share many grammatical structures and some vocabulary with it).

Hebrew was a language spoken widely in the Middle East from 3000 until around 2000 years ago. All Jewish and some Christian religious texts were written in Hebrew. However, the usage of Hebrew began declining towards the second half of that period, and, at the time of Jesus, Aramaic (another Semitic language) was the language spoken much more widely in the areas where Hebrew used to be spoken. Hebrew ceased being a spoken language in about 200 CE, and it was only mostly reserved for religious use: Jewish prayer, and later religious texts.

However, uniquely in the modern world, Hebrew underwent a complete revival and went from being a language used in writing and in very limited contexts to being a complete spoken language. It all started with beginning of the other 19th century nationalistic movements. Zionism - a movement for the re-establishment of a Jewish homeland began, and it resulted in a number of significant events for Hebrew: the writing of literature in Hebrew, the creation of Jewish communities in Palestine, and the usage of Hebrew as a lingua franca by the newly-immigrated Jewish communities. Hebrew schools and newspapers gradually appeared, Hebrew began being used not only as a written language, but also as a spoken language, and some people even opted to use it as a private language in their homes. Gradually, new generations of children were born, and those children already had Hebrew as their mother tongue.

Interestingly, however, the new Hebrew is not completely identical to its old variant. At the time of the revival, Hebrew had not been actively spoken for thousands of years. Moreover, the people coming to Israel were mostly Jewish speakers of various other languages, the most prominent of which was Yiddish (a Germanic Jewish language), but also Jewish dialects of Arabic, and Judaeo-Spanish. These languages all influenced Hebrew, not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar. For example, the new Hebrew had a subject-verb-object sentence order (as common in European languages, for example - 'I see a house') as opposed to the old Hebrew, which would have had a verb-subject-object sentence order (e.g. 'see I a house'). Hebrew is a very interesting linguistic phenomenon, since it is perhaps the only widely-spoken language that underwent such a spectacular revival as a living language.

Hebrew is a language written right to left, and also without vowels (it shares these features with Arabic, which is a language we have described in some more detail, thus it is useful to refer to that description to learn more about Semitic languages).

About Hebrew conjugation

Hebrew conjugation is a process by which Hebrew verbs are modified to accord with various other features of the phrase.

In Modern Hebrew, verb conjugations are marked by:

person - who is committing an action (e.g. I, she, you, etc.);

number - singular (for one person or thing), or plural (for many) - in contrast to another Semitic language Arabic, Hebrew does not have a dual conjugation;